BANGALORE, INDIA: With businesses keen on curbing IT infrastructure costs, virtualization is predicted to have a huge impact on the IT set up of enterprises for the next few years. While some organizations are already enjoying the fruits of early adoption, many are yet to nail the tangible benefits purported by the technology.

"Its all about using very less disk to solve a large problem," states Rich Clifton, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Virtualization and Grid Infrastructures Business Units, NetApp in a discussion with Sigi Achappa, CIOL, on the trends in virtualization and how NetApp is addressing this market. Excerpts.

CIOL: What are the key drivers that are leading to the adoption of virtualization?

Rich Clifton: The dynamics of cost is different in different markets. If you look at labor – administering equipment – it differs across geographies. Power is another – the cost of powering equipment for data centers across a three-year span, can equal cost of procurement. Besides, it varies depending on the cost of power. While, for some it may equal, for some others, it may be about half the cost of procurement. So, a good implementation is always driven by one of them and gets the other as a side effect.

CIOL: What are the factors driving adoption in India?

RC: It is cost reduction, to reduce cost of servers, but the cost factors are not just about how much equipment I buy, or power I save. What I often see in India is real estate – not wanting to build another data center. To sum it up, it is all about reducing equipment, power and real estate, and that, along with the cost of labor, drives virtualization.

CIOL: NetApp has been talking virtualization for a long time. What is the innovation that's taking place?

RC: I focus on storage for a virtualized server environment. The focus is on how to make customers successful – customers really want to virtualize their entire environment, which includes storage, server, the network and the entire components. Working on the customer problems and driving the next generation data center is key.

We are continuing to innovate on the core – that is, DataOntap – building on that, innovating on that and integrating it with the other layers. Many times, people end up storing the same things over and over again. In large databases, with copies after copies — it results in a lot of redundancy. How wonderful it would be if you could deal with by turning on and off a switch. There are people working in that field on de-duplication. It is all about using a very less disk to solve a large problem. That is NetApp's business model.

CIOL: What should an ideal virtualized set up look like?

RC: Currently, the server utilization is 20-30 percent utilized and storage about 30-35 percent. Ideally, it should be about 80 percent utilized.

CIOL: What is the correlation between virtualization and grid infrastructure?

RC: When you look at putting in place a large server environment and making them work together — it is a concept called cloud computing. There is a whole ecosystem – for the inside of which you use virtualization. What you do need are: the right set of partners and tools for the right outcome and bring in the ability to scale.

CIOL: What's the latest update on the interoperability factor?

RC: Interoperability in the SAN area is in good shape – we have been investing in that area with many engineers in Bangalore. A lot of SAN interoperability work is on. The SAN interoperability matrix is quite complete and broad. What we do is – using our advanced tool storage processors and configuring them in a fashion called V series. We put our advanced function on top of other people's (other vendors) storage.

For example, if an organization has a legacy investment in HDS or HP storage, you can put our storage processor and do things like de-duplication and mirroring. You can continuously expand the storage products that can sit behind it. The evolution has been from doing some other products to now 90 percent, which can sit in front of our storage products.

CIOL: How can organizations prevent a virtual sprawl?

RC: The tendency is to create many virtual machines. So, it tends to be a proliferation of the number of virtual machines. If any environment has been created for the sake of productivity, then you don't get rid of it. If they have a long lifetime without much usefulness, then you are burdening the environment. It boils down to the process and management and policies, more than the tools. The tools can only make them implement policies.

CIOL: What are your latest partner/channel initiatives?

RC: The channel focus is getting an added boost. We are partnering with VMWare very aggressively as we can make customers to get the technology consumed very quickly. It is not about pushing the technology that cannot be consumed. We are working together in joint marketing, joint development and projects. And we are looking to partner with other companies as well.

CIOL: Do you foresee a virtualized world – free of boxes?

RC: The question is, if you could solve a given problem with much less hardware, are people going to be happy? There will always be a mix! Right now, people are going to take a step backward in terms of rising cost, rising power, space constraints, but over time will turn back on physical hardware. The advanced technology will be leveraged to solve the next generation computing problems.